The study of Hawaiian coins, tokens, medals, paper money, and scrip.

Strong Bidding for Hawaii Lunch Tokens

I was monitoring the action of three Haiku School lunch tokens and were surprised how strong the bidding was. The seller never provided the Medcalf & Russell catalog numbers! Here are the auction results:

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3 thoughts on “Strong Bidding for Hawaii Lunch Tokens”

As the under bidder in all three instances (two different friends bid on my behalf) my thoughts should be shared.

Bidding against obvious snipe programming, I had no expectation of winning the second or third listings. Those amounts represent mad money spent by others; and not their real value to my way of thinking. Prices I was actually happy NOT to pay; thus, no buyer’s remorse here.
Years ago I brokered a sale of an unlisted Kapiolani school lunch token for $1,300. There were only 3 known at that time.

I bet you any token listed at $300 in Medcalf’s 1991 book is more plentiful than that; and therefore shouldn’t be bringing such exalted prices!

Only wish I had known the even higher prices set as the max on those snipe programs. We might have seen $2,000 or more as their “record prices” paid! Lol.

Now that I reflect on it, the sale price was $1,200 on that Kapiolani token.
The $1,300 figure was what someone once asked for a Koloa lunch token! I basically told that person, I’d never ever pay that much for a Koloa, with the inference he was crazy to ask that much.
It’s not easy acquiring scarcer Hawaii school lunch tokens. “Speculators” and those using snipe programming on the internet are taking a lot of the fun out of collecting. Don’t know who those “spoilers” think will buy those tokens that they’ve overpaid for. I’m certainly not going to reward anyone who’s outbid me.

And my final pet peeve: old time collectors sitting on accumulations of duplicate lunch tokens.
When the Ala Moana school lunch token was so common that they listed at $2.00 each (a fraction
of the then listed price of the generic scalloped edge school milk token!) it’s hard not to imagine
token buyers of four or five decades ago, not buying them figuratively by the handfuls. If so, they
need to free up their unneeded duplicates for the benefit of new collectors.
Years ago when I purchased a small hoard of Olaa school lunch tokens, I didn’t just add one to my
collection and stash the others away so as to perpetuate the idea that they were still scarce. I made
the numerous duplicates available to known collectors for from $45 to $90. It shouldn’t be
too much to expect other token collectors to do likewise for the good of the hobby.